Other standards (outside of semantic web) saw the need to rely on numeric
identifiers, even if that created a burden for their users
e.g. in SNOMED Lung = T-28000
Of course it is a pain to query SNOMED with "all the diseases that affect
T-28000".
But the fact is that despite the inconvenience of having to fetch that
identifier prior to the query, SNOMED is widely used.
What is so special about semantic web identifiers that they don't need to
follow the same path?